The Green Velvet Elephant

This privately published novel tells the story of a Canadian woman’s life in four letters that are to be opened posthumously by her children. The device is odd, because it remains a mystery why each child should be given only a chapter of the mother’s life to read; perhaps the writer assumed that they would all swap letters to get the full picture.

The protagonist is an English-speaking woman from Montreal born in 1912, and the central concern of each of the four chapters is her ambivalence, as an Anglophone Quebecker, about the French. The writer’s reminiscences in the book’s four chapters cover her trip to Paris as a young woman, her childhood in Montreal and at the family cottage, the setting up and success of her small business in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and finally her disillusionment as she leaves the province in 1970 in the period of the October Crisis and the rise of Separatism. The letter device is weak; apart from the letter writer’s ambivalent feelings about her native province, her character is thinly drawn; and the political discussions cover no new ground. This is a mediocre book.